Liz Pead and Patrice Charbonneau
(un)Defined Spaces
in the Main Gallery
Jim Reid
Field of Vision
in the Upper Gallery
August 24 – October 7, 2016
Reception Saturday, September 10, 2-5pm
Liz Pead and Patrice Charbonneau
(un)Defined Spaces
- Liz Pead, New Scotland Fields, 2016, cotton thread on 100 mesh copper, 5 x 8 inches
(un)Defined Spaces features new work by Toronto-based artist, Liz Pead, and Montreal-based artist, Patrice Charbonneau. Spaces, whether interior or exterior, lived or abandoned, are neither uniform nor random, rather they are influenced by culture, habits, and experience. Focusing on diverse environments, these artists build a sense of longing and contemplative understanding in their work.
Raised in coastal New Brunswick, Pead has a profound connection to the Canadian landscape. An accomplished textile artist and painter, Pead explores nationalistic visions of the Canadian landscape and its effect on our ecology. Her paintings are informed by her textile practice and vice versa. Finding inspiration in the textile work of Anni Albers and Eva Hesse, Pead’s latest series are stitched material investigations in fine copper, steel, and brass. Embedded in these works is the presence of the artist’s hand and traces of her repetitive, labourious process. Somewhere between nostalgia and architectural grid, the sketches are the artist’s building blocks for a new terrain. These intimate works speak to the delicate, yet unyielding endurance of nature.
Charbonneau’s fascination with space is evident in his paintings and concurrent architectural practice. Whether translating a location or imagining a site, these settings guide the artist and his interpretations from the real to the invented. Thick impasto layers of acrylic paint are applied to his surfaces alongside carefully placed subtle lines denoting perspective and depth. Charbonneau describes the spaces of the everyday. His interests lie in capturing the unique and personal topography, conscious or unconscious, that everyone experiences. There is an order to Charbonneau’s paintings, evident in his brushwork and compositional strategies, that echo how spaces are ordered yet ephemeral. He hints at the familiar, amplifying the visual rhythms in his painting, which always seem to be about the whole aspect of life, not just a part of it.1
- Patrice Charbonneau, Verdict, 2016, acrylic and crayons on canvas, 27 x 37 inches
1 Craig Hood, Patrice Charbonneau, Upheaval and Boundaries (Montreal: Beaux-arts des Amériques, 2016).
Jim Reid
Field of Vision
August 24 – October 7, 2016
Reception Saturday, September 10, 2-5pm
- Jim Reid, Peel Plain 7-4-16: north from King Street west of Sloan Road, 2016, acrylic on canvas, 76 x 114 inches
Reid’s work is rooted in plein air painting of the 19th and early 20th centuries, and filtered through ideas relating to modernism, expressionism, biology and environmentalism. He is inspired by nature on its own and the complex relationship that exists between the environment and humankind. Despite countless years of research, human understanding of the natural world is far from complete. Nature remains beyond our control, infinitely complex and enigmatic. The fragility and resilience of nature, its order and chaos, fascinate the artist and he approaches his subject with a great deal of sensitivity and depth.
In the past, Reid has created works from deep inside the forest, focusing on the tangled undergrowth of the forest floor and the cycle of growth and decay. In this new body of work, he has shifted his gaze to vast open spaces. Reid has painted this landscape for many years. A historic locale northwest of Toronto, the Peel Plain’s farms reveal a time-layered working of the land dotted with small sections of forest. Distant horizons can still be found there however the plain is rapidly disappearing under the pressure of urban expansion. Reid’s paintings are a contemplation of timelessness and impermanence. At first glance serene, yet energetic and chaotic, they reflect the conflicting forces of a transforming landscape.
- Jim Reid, Peel Plain 16-3-16: north from 10th Sideroad west of Trafalgar Road, 2016, watercolour with graphite and pastel on paper, 11 x 15 inches
